Epifurious

Danger Lurks Around Every 4-Cup

Apparently the El Dorado Roast packets of moth wings and hair aren't all you have to fear from hotel room coffee makers.  Is there anything that enterprising hillbillies CAN'T turn into a meth lab? 

Speaking of hillbillies, searching for info on 4-cup coffee maker packets led me to two links that were extremely concerned with the cost of hotel room coffee:

Crazy Coffee Consulting
and
Thrifty Fun

Making sure to get every last drop of the "Metropolitan" plus adding in a second pressing doesn't sound like fun to me, honestly.  Maybe it is if your coffee maker is full of meth?

Don't do drugs, kids!  Or drink hotel room coffee!

Say It Ain't So!

Mo Pitkins House of Satisfaction, everyone's favorite place to go see Murray Hill perform while eating diner food, is closing! 

It wasn't the most delicious food in the world, but you could tell that a lot of love had gone into that rag-tag little place.  Pour one out for Mo Pitkins, and if you happen to be down in the LES anytime before October 20, drop on in and pay last respecks. 

We'll miss ya!

Pork-ish

OK, I know I've mined this topic before, but I can't help myself!  As the New York Times reports, there are delicious pork buns available in China that are, in fact, made of cardboard, chemicals, and fatty scrap meats!  Yum-O!

''What's in the recipe?'' the reporter asks. ''Six to four,'' the man says.

''You mean 60 percent cardboard? What is the other 40 percent?'' asks the reporter. ''Fatty meat,'' the man replies.

The bun maker and his assistants then give a demonstration on how the product is made.

Squares of cardboard picked from the ground are first soaked to a pulp in a plastic basin of caustic soda -- a chemical base commonly used in manufacturing paper and soap -- then chopped into tiny morsels with a cleaver. Fatty pork and powdered seasoning are stirred in.

Now that's  molecular gastronomy!

Dirty Martini

This warning just in from our West Coast correspondent, Elizabeth Cotten.  After the jump, a very good reason, besides the obvious, not to consume anything manufactured by an Italian company named after a Peanuts character.

"The Aristocrat of the Ocean.''

Perhaps more facts about sable than you'd care to know.
And more.
And more.

"America is Made up of Choices"

Watch this and weep. Though I'm all for deep frying, this is taking things TOO far. That doesn't mean, of course, that if I found myself in Snook, Texas, I wouldn't be tempted to try a little chicken fried bacon. But, come on. Isn't bacon delicious enough on its own?

Some background, and a recipe, should the video leave you wanting more.

"Crap" Puffs and Other Delights

So, now that the election seems like a distant memory, I'm finally getting around to writing the post about it. I have so many excuses. Good ones, too! I went to a wedding. I wrote many papers for the grad school I like to pretend I'm not attending. I had a lot to drink on at least four five occasions (election night included). I went to the Harvard Club (so many old men in one place! I thought I had died and gone to heaven). I wrote an etiquette column. I had to recover from some angry letters about said etiquette column. I played Scrabble. I read The Truth About Diamonds. I feel a little ashamed about that last one, but it's true. I was stuck in an airport! I had no other options, save a textbook about archiving practices. You would have done the same. So, as you can see, I've been rather busy. But now I'm back, ready to regale you with tales about the Bushes and the Mondales, and their terrible (but sometimes frighteningly delicious) ideas about food. After much debate, and the discovery that it's impossible to find chow mein noodles in New York (at least the La Choy, "Chinese" chicken salad kind, which is clearly what the Mondales had in mind), we put together a menu.

Death To The Great Satan, Creamy Salad Dressings, Inshallah!: Part 1

These many posts highlighting the culinary wonders of man and nature have predictably put me in a contrary frame of mind.  IFC’s review of Accents seemed to take us to another place, but by the end, it was clear that Accents is his favorite restaurant of all time – a beloved hideaway “when at the Sutton.”  At this rate, how are we ever going to develop a reputation as  the “bad boys of food blogging” or “les enfants terribles of online culinary journalism”?  How will we ever “spice up the bland stew that is food bloggery", ”or, alternately “crisp up a genre that had grown stale”?  I guess someone needs to truly “go negative” and I guess it’s going to be me.  Below you will find an A-Z of foods I hate.  Foods that are gross.  Foods that should probably never have been invented by god or man.  Sure, some of them are necessary (asafetida), a couple of them are not exactly foods (Neosporin, banana Quik), and some of them are, well, controversial (upon seeing a preliminary list, a friend asked me why I didn’t just have Apple Pie as the first entry).  Enjoy, and let the debates begin!      

A Confession

Truth be told, this blog started as a reactionary statement.  Your editors share in common an ungodly love of food, and an equally strong hatred of a certain strain of epicurean bloggery.  You see, there are evil forces at work in the culinary world.  The perpetrators can be found in every city, in every hamlet, though particularly virulent cells do train and perpetrate in the Bay Area.

One of the leading lights of the Evil Food movement is a food blogger who goes by the seemingly innocuous nom de guerre Heidi, which brings to mind pigtails, the Tyrolean countryside, and hot chocolate.  In fact, she has a recipe for a hot chocolate on her blog, 101cookbooks.com.